For those having trouble with various USB drives.

I posted this on a follow up of my own and decided to make a thread. The HP program is an exceptional piece of software. Consider it like zero filling your thumb drives. This does things that windows manage is uncapable of..as well as dealing with the..CRAP, I got a trojan from a torrent DL of Partition Magic. Noob Proof!!!

For those of you having trouble getting the harddrive to install..I ran into trouble with my Seagate Go 160gb. You need to run this program HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. WARNING!!! This program will wipe out all information on your thumb drive. If you like th cheesy u3 crap..don't run this program. Then run wbfs_win.exe from the command prompt. That is located in the forum as well as a nice how to on using it.

The drive I am using has two USB cables. The data cable is located on the right side, power cable on the left (I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter how it is plugged in)..I am ripping games right now. This process worked on the seagate go. I will try my Patriot 16GB thumb drive next. Hate to wipe out my custom copy of backtrack though.

You could format with the method mentioned above or through the wii. I am waiting on a game to stop ripping and I am going to try three different USB thumb drive brands.

No name patriot 16GB worked with wii format after HP format tool. I suspect that it is 3rd party software keeping most people from using their drives. I am unsure if the USB format tool on the wii zero files the drive during format. Most U3 enabled sticks have them embeded in the boot sector of the drive and regular format will not erase. I ran into this problem when I was trying to install DSL on a thumbdrive and stumbled onto this program. If this helped you at all, give me thanks. If not..keep it civil. ;-)

BTW, the program will install to your root C drive under a folder called drivekey. Run the HPUSBFW.EXE program. It is the one with the GUI.

I just used this on a 30gb ipod video and the wii read the drive no problem and i ripped a game just fine.

I then tried it on a 30gb ipod video that hadnt been formated or anything and i get the -1 errror.Im not sure if its because i didnt use the program or because i never formatted it in windows first.It just has all the music on it.But it was froze up at the time i tried so that might cause it as well.Gonna try this again later to see for sure once its battery goes dead.

I just used this on a 30gb ipod video and the wii read the drive no problem and i ripped a game just fine.

I then tried it on a 30gb ipod video that hadnt been formated or anything and i get the -1 errror.Im not sure if its because i didnt use the program or because i never formatted it in windows first.It just has all the music on it.But it was froze up at the time i tried so that might cause it as well.Gonna try this again later to see for sure once its battery goes dead.

I never tried this on an iPod..but you are aware that it irradicates the drive right? I mean, people that have used this have had no luck on getting the iPod to boot back up once they recopied the software back. You may be able to hook it up to iTunes and do a restore and cross your fingers for iTunes to boot the firmware back.

ipod firmware isnt stored on the drive, you can do what ever you want to do with the drive and format it however you like, and when u want to use it as an ipod again itunes will restore the drive to factory state.